One Beachside Sermon, Two Life-changing Gifts
How Speaking to a Congregation as a College Student Changed One Physician’s Life — and the Lives of Many Others
For the late Tommie Canipe, MD ’59, a chance speaking engagement at a beachside Baptist church in the 1950s changed his life. The way he chose to pay forward his good fortune will change the lives of generations of students at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
By establishing the Tommie Lee Canipe, MD, and Cynthia J. Canipe Scholarship in Memory of John Herbert Holden Jr., Tommie and his wife, Cindy Canipe, helped honor an incredible donor who made his education possible.
“Tommie and I knew it may not be a lot of money, but when you are that student who receives it, everything is valuable,” says Cindy, Tommie’s widow who worked alongside her husband as his nurse for many years in a general surgery practice in High Point, N.C.
The generosity that sparked Tommie’s gift was pure happenstance. As a student at Campbell College, he was encouraged by a friend to go on Christian witness weekends, where college students would speak at a church or substitute for a pastor who may be on vacation. When his friend accidentally double-booked himself to appear at two churches on the same Sunday, he needed help.
“He called Tommie and said, ‘Could you possibly go and speak for me? I’ll take the church in the city, and you can have the Baptist church at Holden Beach,” Cindy says. Tommie agreed to do it.
Church members often gathered love offerings to pay the student speakers, but one member of the congregation on the day Tommie spoke felt moved to give a lot more. John Herbert Holden Jr., whose family-owned Holden Beach, told Tommie he would pay for his education — all of it.
A Gracious, Southern Gentleman
Cindy says Tommie always insisted he had no idea what he might have said that could have produced such a response.
“Tommie was overwhelmed that John would do this, and they developed a friendship,” she says. “Later, when Tommie told him he was thinking he might want to go to medical school, John said it was not a problem. He agreed to pay all his expenses.”
After two years at Campbell, Tommie transferred to Wake Forest College, where he graduated in 1955, and continued on to what was then the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, thanks to Holden’s generosity.
“Tommie decided that when he started his family, he should pay his own way,” Cindy says. “John did not finish paying for the entirety of medical school, but he did take care of a significant portion of it and certainly put Tommie in a position where he could become a physician.”
All thanks to helping a friend in a bind.
There was John, listening to this underfed, poorly dressed boy from Campbell, and God started talking to him,” says Cindy, who noted that, during the Vietnam War, Tommie helped save lives as a general thoracic surgeon based in Japan, where he treated some of the most severely wounded service members.
“John was able to hear about those experiences that Tommie had and could at least know, ‘I played a part in that. I helped put that boy through school.’ John would have never, ever mentioned that to anyone, but it was important that he knew that. He was the most kind, gracious, Southern gentleman I have ever met in my entire life.”
Completing a Thank You
The Canipe and Holden families remained good friends over the years.
“When John passed away, Tommie said he felt terrible that he hadn’t done something for him while he was alive, but John still had two sons,” Cindy says. “Perhaps he could do something to let them know how meaningful their father’s gift was to him.”
That led to the scholarship, established in 2017. The Canipes were able to meet the first few scholarship recipients before Tommie passed away in January 2024 following treatment for bone marrow cancer. Cindy says she hopes more money will be added to the scholarship over time.
“Tommie felt he had completed a thank you by doing that,” she says of the scholarship. “He said he should have done it sooner.
“When someone approached him to talk about it, he would say, ‘You know, you don’t have to do it all. You just have to help.’”